Regime Change: from the Ancien Régime to the French Revolution
Spring 2021
Course: FREN 5360-001
Instructor: Masano Yamashita
Teaching Method: Remote
Meets: W 3:00-5:30pm
Social change in the eighteenth-century was seen as alternatively invisible, cataclysmic—analogous to revolutions in nature, accidental, or willed. This course will attend to the notions of flux, passage, change, and regeneration in the transition from the literature of the Old Regime to the French Revolution. In so doing, we’ll consider the importance of ruptural moments in narration, and how people thought about their agency in terms both collective and individual. Finally we’ll study logics of reinvention and iconoclasm in the cultural production of the French Revolution. Special attention will be paid to theoretical frames of action and change posited by Bruno Latour, Michel de Certeau and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Please contact professor Yamashita at masano.yamashita@colorado.edu if you have any questions.
- Taught in French.